Identifying Trigger Points, Sustainable Solutions & Risk
The Ghost Nets project was based on the premise that just like acupuncture might cure my Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS) by identifying places where energy is blocked, critical points in the landscape could be identified for restoration, with larger impacts. In the future, I'd like to devise and find funding to prove whether that can be proven.
Meanwhile, the process of actually doing that, restoring the former coastal dump site of Ghost Nets on Vinalhaven Island, despite being debilitated by CFS, has meant that I have had to work very slowly, learn a lot and depend on the kindness and interest of others. These were lessons I have needed to learn as much about healing myself, as healing the land.
One of the things I had to learn was just how interdependent my personal healing would be with the land's healing. This was something I had intuited & presumed, but living it over a ten year period was a different experience. A lot of what I experienced was adapting to and accepting the uncertain consequences of risks I chose to take. This is a difficult lesson for anyone but it is the same sort of lesson we need to learn to cope with global warming.
For me, that has meant paying attention to bottom lines of how I take care of myself. At the Ghost Nets site, that meant sitting and studying the plants, the winds, the volunteer indigenous interactions and the persistent eruptions of of exotic species- from meadow grass to green crabs: monitoring the site. That monitoring is always as much about the physical, external site as about my own well-being.
When my journals indicate I am chronically exhausted, more than my usual exhaustion, to the point where I can't care for myself, that is a warning sign that the means I'm applying are unsustainable. When I can't sustain myself, I can't do much for my sites.
In the case of Ghost Nets, the risks I've been taking have included to trust my judgement as an artist to interpret and apply what I was reading, discussing and naturalistically observing about questions that are basically scientific. Since there was no institution to support me and I was devoting my limited time, finances and stamina to an uncertain cause, it sometimes felt very scary. Thatw as especially true as time went on.
The risks we take today to invest in strategies to address global warming are equally problemmatic. The trick in all these models is to move forward short of collapsing the very systems we want to save.
My premise, that critical Trigger Points can become points of biological leverage, may be extrapolated to global warming. It is for that reason that Ghost Nets continues to be my source of inspiration. It remains a metaphor, an avatar of how I continue to work on recovery from CFS. The Ghost Nets site as landscape Trigger Point, CFS and global warming are all like mirrors within mirrors, riddles with as yet vague answers.
